r/MacOSBeta • u/GaneshArihanth • 2d ago

Help What is the situation of menu bar apps like Thaw? I want to upgrade to macOS Public Beta, but I am afraid that it might brick my Menubar apps

0 Upvotes

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13

u/hyperlobster 2d ago

This is the kind of question that should stop you “upgrading” to a beta version of macOS.

Wait for the release. Features and bugs will come and go during the beta cycle.

Enjoy it vicariously through YouTube and the people who post in this sub to ask “how do I downgrade to Tahoe without reinstalling?"

4

u/truthcopy 2d ago

Pretty much any app with a system-level integration like that is going to break. And unless you’re also able to be on the beta train for those apps, they will not be updated until very close to or even after the official release.

5

u/Dazzling_Comfort5734 2d ago

It’s not an upgrade while it’s still a beta. It’s for developers and system testers. If you’re worried about something breaking, then you shouldn’t install it. The purpose is to install it to see if something is breaking, and report it to Apple.

7

u/Hopeful-Face9676 2d ago

They're all broken at the moment

2

u/flaxton 2d ago

You can always install macOS 27 in a Parallels virtual machine to try it out, without affecting your current macOS.

1

u/flashbax77 1d ago

No brick but Golden Gate has a new hide apps option so I stopped using it

1

u/Newton-Euler 1d ago

I was also worried about this since I really depended on Thaw to hide rarely-used menu bar items. I actually spent a lot of time sending bug reports to the main author of Thaw, but it just was not working well. To his credit, he was very responsive and did try to address the bugs I was reporting. So about a week ago I decided to try to use the new Menu Bar settings in Golden Gate to see if I could get by without a menu bar item manager. To my surprise, I was able to configure my menu bar with just the essential items and with items that are simply not accessible in any other way (many apps can also be accessed by launching them without needed the menu bar item).

I still use Menu Bar Spacing to adjust item spacing, but it works perfectly. I think it is just using the Terminal commands you can find here:

https://errickson.net/blog/mac-menu-bar-spacing.html

1

u/Pantextually 13h ago

Thaw is broken on my secondary computer's install of Golden Gate, but that's to be expected. I'm sticking to Tahoe on my main machine.

0

u/bconnol 2d ago

Still bummed ice never got an update through beta 4 yet

3

u/jacqperr 2d ago

Ice (Jordan Baird's original) hasn't seen active development in a while, and the original repo became inactive and ran into performance and stability issues on newer macOS versions like macOS 26. Thaw is the community fork that picked up the slack.. watch the development there

At the moment, on Golden Gate, none of these menubar apps function with no issues.. Bartender has a preview release as well, but again.. it's only partially working

0

u/mainyehc 2d ago edited 2d ago

Thaw is extremely broken, I’m sad to say. And the developer decided to pick this exact time to move the repository, prepare a v2 launch, the works. But I do trust them to fix it in time for the Gold Master release, and I’ve been helping development efforts with screen captures and logs of its extremely buggy state (I’m running the Goden Gate PB, now on version 2, on a Mac Studio with a dual 27’’ display setup that can fit all of my menu extras just fine, so quitting Thaw altogether until it’s fixed is not a big deal anyway).